"I had nothing to say – I was going through a time in my life where I didn't really want to share what was going on, but I didn't want to be boring," Mayer tells Guy Raz on NPR's All Things Considered, taped Friday in Philadelphia.

"I remember thinking to myself, 'We gotta give a Rolling Stone interview … I don't want anybody at Playboy to think this is a boring interview.' I got those lines so crossed, that what you read – among other things, obviously – is this complete miscalculation in why I was asked to do the interview."

"I wasn't prepared to be honest, but I knew that I had to be open," he continues. "When you're just open but not honest, then you start free-associating garbage. It doesn't mean I can go back and scrub it out, but I understand it [now]."

An inflated sense of self-importance and a need for control was at the root of the problem, the Grammy-winning guitarist explains – and it came with some unpleasant side effects.

" 'I've got to change their mind,' " Mayer, 34, recalls of his thought-process at the time. "I'd read comments [that said], 'He's a d-bag.' And then you go, 'No, I'm not!' If you're a control freak you [think], I'm going to figure out a way to make that one guy say, 'He's not all that bad.' "

"I completely lost sight of what the original plan was, which is [to] make music for anybody who wants to hear it," he notes. "There was a part of me that was dead – a certain thoughtfulness that was gone."

"I hope people want to receive this music. I have so much that I need to say – I hope I get a chance to say it. I hope people are interested," he says, comparing the way he's feeling to "the exact same thing that a kid would say to himself before he had a record deal – all you have to do is put the word 'again' after it."